Head-to-head comparison
GPT-3.5 Turbo Instruct (OpenAI) and o4 Mini (OpenAI) compared on the ModelCap Index, API price, context window, provider availability, weight access and every public benchmark board they share. Figures are the same ones shown on the live rankings; nothing here is a hidden score.
Snapshot as of 17 August 2026
As of 17 August 2026, o4 Mini holds the stronger ModelCap Index position (#57 vs #107); GPT-3.5 Turbo Instruct is 2.2× cheaper per output token ($2.00/1M vs $4.40/1M); and o4 Mini offers the longer context window (200K vs 4K tokens).
Evidence: publisher corpus prior · leave-one-anchor-out calibrated · 4 public benchmark observations across 4 boards. Prices are the lowest listed API offer per million tokens observed on the OpenRouter catalogue.
Scores are the sources' own published figures for each model's best evaluated configuration; ModelCap never re-runs a benchmark.
Want a different pairing? Open the interactive comparison tool to swap either model for any current ranked language model.
o4 Mini ranks higher on the ModelCap Index as of 17 August 2026: #57 against #107. That is a capability ranking built from public benchmark evidence with published uncertainty; whether it is "better" for you also depends on price, context and where you can run it.
GPT-3.5 Turbo Instruct is cheaper on output tokens: $2.00/1M against $4.40/1M. Input tokens are $1.50/1M for GPT-3.5 Turbo Instruct and $1.10/1M for o4 Mini. Prices are the lowest listed API offer ModelCap observed, in USD per million tokens.
o4 Mini has the larger context window: 200K tokens against 4K.
The two models do not share a coding benchmark board on ModelCap yet, so no head-to-head coding score is published; the ModelCap Index position is the closest overall signal.
GPT-3.5 Turbo Instruct: API only. o4 Mini: API only. Open weights mean the checkpoint can be downloaded and self-hosted under its licence; API-only models are available solely through hosted endpoints.
ModelCap currently lists 1 API provider for GPT-3.5 Turbo Instruct and 1 for o4 Mini, from the OpenRouter catalogue snapshot the site serves; each model page lists the providers and their prices.
Every figure comes from the sealed ModelCap dataset published 17 August 2026; the page re-renders within a minute of each data refresh, and the ModelCap Index positions are the same ones shown on the live rankings.